A fabric that bends and ripples under the weight of the stars. A clock that runs slower perched high in the mountains. Objects that only exist when they’re being watched. Endless tiny particles, swarming restlessly in the void.

Deep in the heart of the Amazon, legends tell of a river so hot that it boils from below. As a geoscientist, Andrés Ruzo’s training told him the stories couldn’t be true. But that was before he saw the river with his own eyes.

The premise of Barsk: The Elephant’s Graveyard sounds a bit out-there: It’s a space opera about anthropomorphic elephants! But the themes of bigotry, greed, corruption, and kindness Lawrence M. Schoen explores in his first novel make this weird future feel deeply human.

It’s meant to be a simple demonstration. For years, quantum cryptographer Kerek Reidier has been developing teleportation technology in his top-secret, DARPA-funded lab, and he’s already performed dozens of successful trials.

We still think of the California drought as a problem that’ll eventually go away. But if perennial dryness is in our future, life in the West will be radically transformed. A new novel gives us a vivid and disturbing portrait of what our parched future might look like.

For more than century, humans have imagined building colonies on Mars, and now settling the Red Planet is no longer a pipe dream—it’s something we might achieve in little over a decade. And many people, including the author of the new book How We’ll Live on Mars, believe our very survival as a species hinges on it.